EPEL Vortrag: Understanding Confucianism - the biographical temptation
6. April 2018, von AAI Webmaster
On April 6th 2018, Dr. Isabelle Sancho from the Centre de Recherches sur la Corée (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France) held a lecture on "Understanding Confucianism: the biographical temptation".
This talk aimed to present some methodological issues surrounding the study of Korean Confucianism. The first part of the talk examined why, in the Korean case, Confucianism has been reduced to being simply a crutch to explain anything and everything in Korean culture and society. It summarized the contradictory understandings of Confucianism in Western countries and alluded to the Japanese colonial stance towards Confucianism, Sinitic culture, and modernity. It then described how Confucianism has been progressively considered as a pre-modern ideology rather than a living tradition in the 20th century Korea, opening up the way for systematical studies centered on a few schools, debates, and periods that have been taken for granted since a few decades now.
The second part of the talk discussed some of the problems caused by these modern narratives. For that, it explained the Chosŏn Confucians’ own perception of their common trajectory and project, i.e. their own perception of “Confucianism.” The talk showed that the Korean confucian tradition was centered on individuals and shaped by the genealogical model taken from the notion of the Transmission of the Way. The talk then broached the question of the ambiguous status of biography in social sciences and historiography. It concluded by explaining why a biographical approach could still be a tempting option in order to renew existing studies about Korean Confucianism. To give some flesh and blood to this idea, the case of Yulgok Yi I (1536-1584) was taken as an example.